Solar's big heyday may be just three years away as the unsubsidized cost of panels plus storage is set to become cheaper than retail power supply in several large markets, Bernstein said.

"The math would work in: Australia, Japan and Spain. Brazil and parts of California will become economic shortly thereafter," Bernstein said in a note last week. "At that point, solar without subsidy and without kid-glove regulatory treatment, would - if combined with energy storage solutions - be capable of supplying electricity ('on' and 'off')."

It expects solar will reach a cost below $0.40 a watt by 2018, leading to a combined cost of the solar-plus-battery electricity supply of $0.24 a kilowatt hour on an unsubsidized basis in select markets, including Australia, where residential retail power averages $0.26 a kilowatt hour.

The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there's no going back.

The shift occurred in 2013, when the world added 143 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity, compared with 141 gigawatts in new plants that burn fossil fuels, according to an analysis presented Tuesday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance annual summit in New York. The shift will continue to accelerate, and by 2030 more than four times as much renewable capacity will be added.

"The electricity system is shifting to clean,'' Michael Liebreich, founder of BNEF, said in his keynote address. "Despite the change in oil and gas prices there is going to be a substantial buildout of renewable energy that is likely to be an order of magnitude larger than the buildout of coal and gas."

We love birds! We really do! That's why we think it's important to keep things in perspective and do the things that will really help them and make a difference. Many people have this obsession with wind turbines killing birds, probably because it's a really great story. As a meme, it really strikes the imagination because wind turbines are this green thing, right, so killing birds is antithetical to what they're supposed to be doing...

World Bank will only fund coal projects in cases of 'extreme need' due to the risk climate change poses to ending world poverty, says Jim Yong Kim

The World Bank will invest heavily in clean energy and only fund coal projects in "circumstances of extreme need" because climate change will undermine efforts to eliminate extreme poverty, says its president Jim Yong Kim.

Why has the price of oil been so volatile?

The largest solar panel power plant in the world (626GWh) is located in the desert about 160 kilometers southwest of Phoenix. The plant was just completed in April 2014 and that has a lot to do with why it's in the number 1 position. Swanson's Law (really just an observation) tells us that the cost for the panels that make up a PV plant halve roughly every two years - meaning that every two years companies can build plants double the size for the same price.

Natural gas is often touted as a “bridge” fuel to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions during a transition from coal-fired power plants to renewable sources of energy. But natural gas offers few short-term benefits over coal, according to a study released last week by Energy Innovation, as long as the natural-gas infrastructure continues to leak methane.

A fight over fracking is looming in Texas. Another stand-off is shaping up in Colorado. Yet drillers' reactions couldn't be more different.

In Texas, drillers are doing their noisy in-your-face fracking as usual. Meanwhile, on a small farm about an hour from the Colorado Rocky Mountains, the oil industry is giving fracking a makeover, cutting back on rumbling trucks and tamping down on pollution.

Today [21 Sep 2014] hundreds of thousands turned out for the People's Climate March in New York City and in other cities around the world demanding action to combat climate change.

The marchers would not be sympathetic to Ascendant's $640,688 drop in profits reported earlier this week due, in part, to Belco plant inefficiencies which cause them to burn excessive quantities of fossil fuel.

Britain is in the midst of a green energy revolution after production soared to record levels, according to new figures which deal a blow to opponents of renewable energy and a potential boost for consumers.

The amount of electricity generated from renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydro has soared by 43 per cent in the past year to account for a fifth of production, as newly-built plants came on stream and the weather became windier, the Office for National Statistics has said.

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